- It’s
better to learn a harsh life lesson now than when you’re in the real world, eh Notre
Dame sophomore safety Drue Tranquill? College is the time to experiment, f*ck
up and do stupid sh*t you won't be able to do once you leave campus for good
and Tranquill took that to painful extremes Saturday when he suffered a serious
right knee injury doing something that a sadly high number of professional
athletes have done in recent years. Tranquill, who tore the ACL in his left
knee last November, was geeked after a crucial third-down pass breakup in the
end zone late in the second quarter of his team’s 30-22 win over No. 14 Georgia
Tech and decided to commemorate the moment by chest-bumping teammate Joe
Schmidt. It was a maneuver the two players have likely done dozens of times and
it was never a serious problem, but in one of hteir biggest games of the
season, things came off the rails. Tranquill appeared to hurt his right knee
and left the game with his team leading 13-7. The Fighting Irish held off a
late Georgia Tech rally for the win, but the sight of Tranquill fighting back
tears as he was helped off the field will be difficult to shake. At least now
he knows that jubilant celebrations are a true workplace hazard for athletes
and if he’s ever fortunate enough to make it to the NFL, he can apply that
lesson and avoid a third major knee injury because he just has to party after
knocking down a relatively meaningless pass less than halfway through an
early-season game………
- Man,
this cannot be what a dinosaur had in mind for its legacy when it roamed the
earth thousands of years ago. Dinosaurs are revered, celebrated and exist as
objects of mysterious admiration for so many, be it as carnivores, herbivores,
massively tall, compact and powerful, horned or flying. They’re given prime
places in museums and have TV shows and movies made about them. They’re not
supposed to be described as “a fat pony with a big
head and horns,” which is how the team that discovered what it has deemed an
example of a brand-new species that has significant similarities with the
triceratops but appeared on Earth about 9 million years earlier. The dinosaur,
named “Ava,” was pieced together by a team of Colorado-based paleontologists
working in Montana. Mike Triebold -- after consulting with four experts from
other institutions -- led the team that found Ava and seems pretty psyched
about finding what sounds like the chubby, ostracized dork of the dinosaur
world. "A lot of times when you find a new species, it's just a scrap,"
Triebold said. "We actually have 85 percent of the entire body of this
animal." Triebold and his team began focusing on an area in Montana's Judith River formation in search
of fossils and chose the name Ava for their find because they initially thought
their find was an example of an avaceratops, an existing species. Additional
fossils convinced them that they had stumbled upon a new species. The Ceratopsian
dinosaur is believed to have lived in the late Cretaceous period. Its Montana
home featured a flatter terrain than it now boasts with the Rocky Mountains at
their full height and experts believe the climate was wet, warm and humid,
producing plenty of lush vegetation. Ava has been measured at 11.5 feet long by 4.25 feet tall with a nose
horn and two other horns on the brow,
which don’t sound like any pony we’ve ever known………..
- In
the Remake/Sequel Era in which Hollywood unapologetically lives, it’s a true
miracle that it took this long for someone to what Disney is finally getting
around to. More than 50 years after one of the cheesiest, corniest and most
ridiculous movie musicals ever created predictably became a fan favorite, the
annoying and sing-songy Mary Poppins is set to make a return to the silver
screen. Disney is developing a new live-action
movie based off the 1964 classic starring Julie Andrews in the title role as a
singing nanny with magical powers, alongside Dick Van Dyke. At least this one
won't be a shameless remake of the original and instead, it will be set around
20 years after the first movie, hopefully with Poppins as an aged-out
misanthrope who now hates children and screams at them to get off her lawn
before she grabs them, flies high into the sky and drops them on their
irritating little asses. That’s unlikely, but the story is expected to borrow
heavily from the book series that P.L. Travers wrote. The original movie was
based on the first book in the series, which published its last tome in 1988. Rob
Marshall, who directed "Into the Woods" and "Pirates of the Caribbean:
On Stranger Tides" for Disney, will oversee the project with help from the
songwriting duo of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who worked on
"Hairspray" and "Smash.” Their original songs and musical score
mean the film will also be a musical, which will likely have a better
relationship with the legacy of Travers than the original movie. Travers
famously hated the way Disney handled the film, but the studio is working with
her estate on the new movie………
- Big
ups to Russia's beleaguered opposition and all of those who very literally put
their lives and freedom on the line by attending a protest rally in an outlying
Moscow neighborhood to decry the tyrannical 15-year rule of President/dictator
Vladimir Putin. Showing up for an anti-Putin rally is the right move inasmuch
as he’s a horrible despot who has bent and broken the rules to remain in power
and plunge Russia deeper and deeper into the throes of communism, but it’s also
a risky one because opposing Putin means you’re almost certainly going to end
up on the government’s sh*t list and that means your future will include some
time in subhuman secret prisons, torture, forced labor and possibly a one-way
ticket to Siberia. Living in the moment, it’s great to see protestors denounce the
Kremlin-controlled political system that allows Putin to stay in power and prevents
the opposition from running in elections while decrying political repression
and official corruption. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny boldly demanded that
Russians not give up hope of changing their corrupt, unjust system and said the
opposition's mission was "to work with those who don't believe" that
anything can be changed. The rally took place despite lingering memories of a
violent government crackdown on the opposition after anti-Putin protests drew
huge crowds in the winter of 2011-2012 and hopefully it will be remembered
fondly by all those who attended when they’re farming rocks in Siberia in a
year………..
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